iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 19/05/2026

This shot from a hockey game exemplifies how omnipresent gambling has become: it has THREE different companies advertised in one frame: FanDuel (twice), Kalshi and Circa -- plus 2x odds at the bottom.

a frame from a hockey game, with gambling references circled

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 19/05/2026

I wondered: How much has the legalization of online sports gambling transformed watching sports on TV? We got an AI to watch fifty hours of sports to find out. Every single game had gambling ads, promotions or other references. Every single one! But some sports had far more than others.

an event plot shows minutes in a typical hour of six sports featuring a gambling reference. NCAA women's basketball is the most, but it's almost all ESPN ticker's with odds. NHL hockey is second, with forty minutes shaded, mostly from in-arena ads. NBA basketball has the third-most. NFL football, NCAA basketball and NCAA men's basketball have the least -- about 4 to 5 minutes a game.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 17/12/2025

TikTok's algorithm knew how much Olympics content to give you four months early -- in April 2024. This chart shows quintile cohorts based on how much Olympics content users got during the Olympics (Jul/Aug). But -- amazingly -- the rank order of Olympics vids stays the same, even months beforehand.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremy-b-merrill-644b1412_how-does-tiktoks-algorithm-figure-out-if-activity-7407155110214250496-K9Bl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAKoE5QBuFNKEL2yq0MZ4ZtO-_pmoGqU1l0

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Meghan Hoyer @meghanhoyer.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

We used 1,100 real users' data to help re-create TikTok’s algorithm, and then made a map, allowing you to explore the hidden divides that decide what content you see - and what you don't. Awesome work by @fox.computer, Leslie Shapiro & @jeremybmerrill.com: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

washingtonpost.com

Are you in TikTok’s cat niche? What 121,000 videos reveal

We re-created TikTok’s algorithm based on 1,100 users’ feeds. Explore which topics are in your feed and see what the algorithm is least likely to show you.

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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 10/12/2025

Love this @jeremybmerrill.com @fox.computer piece mapping TikTok's brain, especially the tool they made to find a content theme's diametric opposite. People who like the "Fallout" games, for instance, aren't very interested in videos about having hair www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 25/04/2025

27 crypto wallets acquired ~$1,000,000+ of the president's memecoin after top holders were invited to a special dinner with Trump. It "creates the specter of a pay-to-play deal". So who are payers? There are hints that many aren't even American. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

washingtonpost.com

How Trump team turned a dinner invite into a crypto boon worth millions

Nearly two dozen crypto wallets acquired more than 100,000 $TRUMP meme coins, worth roughly $100 million, after the team said top buyers could join the president for dinner.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 01/04/2025

Newsmax just went public. Its 10-K annual report says: "A diverse and inclusive workplace is not merely a strategy or business objective; it is fundamentally woven in the fabric of the Company." www.sec.gov/Archives/edg...

sec.gov

Document

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 07/02/2025

why are you characterizing me as "having a meltdown"?

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Ence Morse @ence.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

One more thing to note about the USAID cuts: Project 2025's text actually recommended *more* USAID programs to counter China’s Belt + Road Initiative. and criticized Biden for discontinuing particular Trump-era USAID programs. Speaks to how quickly all this blew up.

The next conservative Administration should restore and build on the Trump
Administration’s counter-China infrastructure at USAID, end the climate policy
fanaticism that advantages Beijing, and assess bilateral aid through the lens of
U.S. national security interests, rewarding those countries that resist China’s
debt diplomacy. It should finance programs designed to counter specific Chinese
efforts in strategically important countries and eliminate funding to any partner
that engages with Chinese entities directly or indirectly. USAID’s Bangkok-based
Regional Development Mission for Asia should focus its strategic attention on
supporting cross-border initiatives designed to counter Chinese influence.

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Ence Morse @ence.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Who put USAID on Elon Musk's radar? @sarahellison.bsky.social and I found that Musk only began posting about the agency after ⁦right-wing influencer Mike Benz appeared on Joe Rogan, calling the organization a CIA front. More: www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

washingtonpost.com

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 07/02/2025

I don't think you've proven your headline.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 07/02/2025

There’s no more Gulf of Mexico Division of the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s now the Gulf of America Division. As of Wednesday, the agency has also renamed the body of water even on obscure pages about mangrove swamps. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

A screenshot of EPA's Mangrove Swamps website, saying "Four species of tropical mangroves can be found around the Gulf of America. Their extensive root systems protect the coast from erosion and storm damage. The mangrove here (inset) is a red mangrove."

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 04/02/2025

analytics.usa.gov says the US Government's official National Strategic Dad Joke Reserve website only got 861 pageviews in the past month. I think we can do better than that.

analytics.usa.gov

analytics.usa.gov | The US government's web traffic.

Official data on web traffic to thousands of US federal government websites. Published by the Digital Analytics Program.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 04/02/2025

... ... did you know the US government has a dad joke website? www.fatherhood.gov/for-dads/dad...

fatherhood.gov

Dad Jokes | Fatherhood.gov

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Aaron Schaffer @aaronschaffer.com · 23/01/2025

Fun fact: there used to be a different Gulf of America...in the Sea of Japan archive.org/details/grea...

archive.org

Great Soviet encyclopedia : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

v. : 29 cm

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 22/01/2025

"Gulf of America" first sprung up in a pretty unexpected place. One of the first references I can find to the idea of renaming the Gulf of Mexico? Comes from Stephen Colbert and partially sponsored by... Bing. From 15ish years ago: news.softpedia.com/news/Bing-Do...

news.softpedia.com

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Doug MacMillan @douglasmac.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

I've spent the past year obsessed with how police are using facial recognition. What I found: Police in 12 states have used these tools to find and arrest suspects when they have no other evidence, leading to wrongful arrests wapo.st/4fQYlXn 🧵 what I learned from 1,000 docs & dozens of sources ->

wapo.st

Arrested by AI: Police ignore standards after facial recognition matches

Confident in unproven facial recognition technology, sometimes investigators skip steps; at least eight Americans have been wrongfully arrested.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 06/01/2025

more like justin trudeaun't amirite

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 20/12/2024

Yeah, it's fair question! The view count metrics act right, in that there aren't any sharp discontinuities and many US-focused accounts (i.e. not Elon and Trump) have slower increases overnight and faster increases during the day in the US.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 19/12/2024

Elon Musk's total view count on Twitter is way way bigger (16x) than that of Congress as a whole. chart by @kevinschaul.bsky.social

A bubble chart shows one huge orange bubble for Elon Musk's 127.6 billion views and a bunch of small and tiny green bubbles for Congress's 7.1 billion views

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 18/12/2024

I don't think there's any evidence he's just making it up.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 18/12/2024

This was actually one of my research questions for this project: do view count stats over time make sense? And they do! Elon's follow a very consistent pattern. US-centric less-popular figures' view count growth slows overnight and accelerates during awake hours.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 17/12/2024

Elon Musk has a political megaphone unmatched in modern society. He got a total of 133 billion views since July, and ~1/3 of his posts are about politics. His typical tweet gets more than 2.4 million views in just one hour, according to our novel view-count time-series dataset. 🎁: wapo.st/3VLjlI6

A chart shows the view count trajectory of Elon Musk's and Donald Trump's tweets, titled "Views of each X post in 26 days around the election". Elon Musk has many above 100 million, while Trump's are all less than 100 million.

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Crypto is the Solution @cryptosolutions.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

The problem of single women learning to cope with the scarcity of suitable men? blockchain fixes this. #web3 #crypto #blockchain #defi

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 02/12/2024

I was so tempted to buy this when I got the email about it the other day.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 02/12/2024

This one is not actually all that exciting! This is from an examination of TikTok. The x-axis is something like "average proportion of video watched" (I don't totally remember; old chart) and so the big cluster is regular videos and the lil cluster on the left is ads... which on average people skip.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 02/12/2024

I like this chart. It tells a story. It's a bimodal distribution, which is my favorite kind of chart. It tells me that I've got two kinds of things: A bunch of the things on the right, centered at 0.8 and some of the things on the left, around 0.1 to 0.2.

an untitled bimodal distribution, with a bit spike around 0.8 and a much smaller spike around 0.1. y-axis goes to 350 from 0.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 29/11/2024

Genuinely jazzed to un-forget about this bot, which proposes fixing literally every problem every discussed in (IIRC) 10 years of NYT articles, with crypto/web3/DeFi/Bitcoin.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 29/11/2024

The spammer blocked me preemptively, which made it hard to trace this. Would be nice if bsky would let custom-domain accounts block their default _______.bsky.app account to prevent this kind of thing.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 29/11/2024

I did write about some guys who made $180M via digital marketing to sell (allegedly) overpriced coins to elderly Republicans, but it ended in an FBI raid, seizure of their assets and an ongoing civil suit. Wouldn't recommend. Read about that industry here: www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 29/11/2024

There's an imposter of me DMing people tips on how to make $700,000 via digital marketing. Real: @jeremybmerrill.com Fake: @jeremybmerrill.bsky.app Convincing. But it's not me.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 13/11/2024

oh hey this was my chart that my job posted on this website, check out this chart I made last week

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 13/11/2024

Hey, woohoo, thanks very much! If you've got Qs, hit us up. Happy to calculate where you fall on that histogram, e.g.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 13/11/2024

TikTok's algorithm is super personalized -- and super opaque. So, my colleagues and I asked 1,000 people to send us their browsing histories, and we found: Most people get about 8% politics in their feeds, but a few get as much as 30%. gift link: wapo.st/40uSUJG

A histogram of the proportion of TikTok feeds that is about politics or social issues. The big peak is around 6-10%, with a long right tail towards 25% or 30%, and a small left tail towards 1% and 2%.

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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 04/11/2024

Fascinating data here but I mostly love that women on TikTok were twice as likely as men to hear the “Freek-a-Leek" JD Vance I'm-a-Never-Trump-guy remix (which really is a banger) www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 29/10/2024

New: On Elon Musk’s X, Republicans go viral as Democrats disappear. We analyzed 100 top political accounts and found that Republicans are getting followed more and going viral more now that the world’s richest Trump supporter is running the show. Gift link: wapo.st/4fmNIvF w/ @jeremybmerrill.com

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Caitlin Gilbert @caitlingilbert.bsky.social · 03/11/2024

NEW: political content shown on TikTok can depend on your gender—women received ~11% more content about Harris than men did, while men (including liberal ones) were more likely to be shown videos about Trump w/ @jeremybmerrill.com @viacristiano.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

washingtonpost.com

What’s in your TikTok feed? As elections near, it may depend on gender.

A Washington Post analysis of six months of feeds points to gender differences in how the hugely popular platform serves up political news.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 10/10/2024

glad at least two people read these :)

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Mike Stucka @mikestucka.bsky.social · 13/10/2023

The wonderful people at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution are hiring a political data journalist to work full-time on political data, starting with 2024 elections. Minimum pay is around $80,000. Must move to Georgia but the company has a relocation stipend.

jobs.coxenterprises.com

Data Journalist, Politics

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s mission is to be the most essential and engaging source of news and information for the people of Atlanta, of Georgia and the South. To achieve that mission, we ...

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 13/10/2023

If accelerationism is increasing every day, should we call it jerk-ism? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(p...

en.m.wikipedia.org

Jerk (physics) - Wikipedia

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 12/10/2023

jobs.coxenterprises.com/en/jobs/job/... I don't know you but I saw your post and... data journalism and quantitative social science have a lot in common - and, hey, it's in Atlanta, so figured you might be interested.

jobs.coxenterprises.com

Data Journalist, Politics

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 12/10/2023

Ehh, even with that fix, my algorithm requires a stricter match for the sham/cham(pagne) or pseudo/suda(fed). I could probably refactor to allow it (and in fact am itching to refactor) but probably wiser to let the project lie.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 12/10/2023

Let's find out! It doesn't quite meet my rubric as written, but "Sudafeds for...", with a plural, does. But it's a little worrisome whether "Sudafeds" is in the CMU pronouncing dictionary and whether it and "feds" are in wordnet.

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